


Shadow Puppets

by IncurablePeppermint



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Adventure, Brothers, Gen, Investigations, Lena (Mentioned) - Freeform, Magic, Magica de Spell (Mentioned) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 11:17:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncurablePeppermint/pseuds/IncurablePeppermint
Summary: Huey thinks it's time to figure out if they can revive Lena and on-site research is the first step





	Shadow Puppets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gingayellow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingayellow/gifts).



Huey flips through his Junior Woodchuck guide fervently, unsure of the actions he is taking. Sure, Webby has been down. Sure, Scrooge and Donald and every other adult seem to be ignoring the situation. And, sure, Lena is his friend too. But this nonetheless feels like an overstepping of boundaries. There _has_ to be a page on spying, investigating, poking around, or ransacking.

Dewey unceremoniously tosses a lava lamp behind him and it separates into three parts. Huey catches the glass before it falls to the ground. He pops his guide back under his hat before picking up the other two pieces and assembling the set back into a lamp then setting it on the cheap dresser on the side of the room furthest from the destructive forces of hurricane Dewey.

“You need to be careful! What if Magica is staying down here? Or there’s traps? Or Lena finds out and glues you to your bed one night?”

“At least that would be interesting, you promised adventure!”

“I told you exactly what we were doing and said no such thing!”

“Well I _assumed_ there would be adventure! Besides, what do you want me to do? You said we had to go fast in case Magica still lives down here.”

“If anything throwing that lamp took _more_ time.”

“You not shutting up is taking the _most_ time.” Dewey gets down on his hands and knees and starts hunting through some books under a table at the foot of the bed. “And it’d go faster if you’d _actually_ search.” Huey rolls his eyes, but can’t argue. Supervising is really just annoying his brother and making it _more_ likely for things to be broken. Besides, this was Huey’s idea and he should follow through with it.

He holds his hand in front of the top drawer of the dresser for a few seconds before he takes a deep breath and opens it up. Sweaters and other tops and none of it properly folded. He sifts through them, trying to quickly organize the clothes as he goes both out of habit and due to the grating feeling in the back of his head when he sees this kind of clutter. He wonders if he should pack a bag of this stuff just in case they actually manage to revive (Reshade? Reumbrinate?) Lena. All he finds is that Lena has carved her name and some doodles into the bottom of this drawer. Next drawer.

A few skirts, also not folded in any way. Food wrappers? Why did she even put those in here, this isn’t even close to her bed or a chair or _anything_. She would’ve had to get up, open the drawer, then stuff this mega chocolate muffin wrapper in here. Whatever, it’s not Huey’s problem. He isn’t here to clean. He needs to focus.

He puts all the wrappers in the waste bin. Then he hunts through the wadded, wrinkled skirts for any secret hidden wrappers that might attract ants or other pests. Huey almost throws away another ‘wrapper’ before realizing it’s a piece of paper. He unfolds it to find, in purple glitter pen, “UMBRANOMICON.” There’s nothing else on it that could help or give a hint, but it has to be important.

One, that's a book of shadows, so obviously it’s related. But with the way it was hidden in with _garbage_ , in such a weird place... Lena put it there for someone to find. Even if, as Huey suspects may be the case, Magica has already been down here and gotten her grubby green fingers on anything she deemed helpful, she wouldn’t bother with her teen ward’s garbage drawer. Smart.

“Dewey, I found something!”

“What? Already? Ugh, I’ve been doing the dirty work and you open a drawer and _there it is_.”

“Yeah, yeah. But look.” Huey holds out the paper, which Dewey takes.

“Lena needs to work on her penmanship. So what?”

“So what? So _what_? Do you know what-... Oh you don’t know what an Umbranomicon is, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

“Necronomicon?”

“Book that creepy guys use to make dead guys not dead. Like in that video game Louie likes.”

“Yes, okay. So that, but instead of ‘necro’ as in ‘dead’ it’s ‘umbra’ as in ‘shadow.’ So...”

“So like Lena?”

“Yes!”

“Great! Where’s the book?”

“What?”

“The book! This is a piece of paper.”

“I only found the paper.”

“What do we do with _that_?”

“Research! We know what we need now! Lena left this so someone would find it, and we found it.”

Dewey crosses his arms, then turns to give the room a final look over. “Okay, but _you’re_ doing the research.” He takes a book from the mostly-empty bookshelf and flips through it, then throws it behind him. Huey catches it. It’s a teen romance book about witches.

Huey snorts. “Well, yeah.”

Dewey shoots him a look. “It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I don’t want to.”

“Uh huh.”

“Ugh, whatever. All that's left here is dust and old cheese snacks. Can we go now?”

Dewey leans against the bookshelf and crosses his arms, then there is a clicking noise. He steps away quickly. “Wha-at?” The shelf, and part of the wall, turn around, revealing another wall and an unlit torch on a pedestal. Just a glimpse of the room past it is visible before the section clicks into place and blocks it off again. “A secret room! And you thought there wasn’t any adventure down here.”

The new section of wall is decorated with three weird shapes. All of them are formed from a long, straight shape, ending in something else. Huey walks up to the wall and eyes one of the shapes, hand on his chin. “Weird. What do you think this mean?”

Dewey makes a sign with his hand, something like a shadow puppet rabbit, but with the thumb extended slightly behind the palm rather than completing the mouth. He holds it up to the first of the three shapes. It’s a pretty close match. “I dunno. Looks like nonsense to me.”

“That’s not helpful.” Huey turns to glare at him, but instead his eyes widen and then he glances between Dewey’s hand sign, the wall, and the torch a few times. “That’s it! Dewey, you’re a genius!”

“Yeah, of course I am. Now explain why I am cause I don’t get it.”

“Your hand, the torch, the wall! It’s a shadow puzzle!”

Crosstalking, Dewey says “A shadow puzzle” as Huey does, but just a little slower. “Of course, glad I thought of it.” Huey ignores him and takes out his handy Senior-Junior Woodchuck’s flint kit, then uses that to light the torch. Dewey takes the hint as he sees his shadow appear and moves his hand a little up and to the left, then takes two steps back. His shadow lines up with the first shape and when it does, the shape sinks into the wall a little with a grinding noise. “Sweet.”

When he pulls his hand away, the shape remains sunk. “Alright,” Huey says, more to himself than his brother, “How to do this middle one...?” It looks like a... Lump? On a thin pedestal. They won’t be making it with their arms due to its place in the middle. “Books! Books, how many books do we have?”

Dewey starts picking up all the teen dime books he tossed and hands them to Huey when he gets a decent stack. “What, you think you’ll find the answer in ‘My Heart Belongs to A Wolf-Shark-Woman’?”

Huey shakes his head and places the first stack almost directly in front of the middle shape. After a little nudging they perfectly fill the very bottom of it. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more pedestal left to fill and Dewey only delivers about four more books. “You’re lucky I threw these, they would’ve been on the other side of the wall.” Huey ignores him, too busy trying to figure out how to keep filling the shape. Square, small. Rectangular, tall. Something. Sweaters? He runs over to the dresser and turns the top drawer out. “Hey, hey! What happened to ‘Dewey, stop throwing things, Lena will shave your eyebrows’ or whatever?”

“Not now!” He carefully folds one of Lena’s sweaters into a tight rectangle. It’s taller than a book, but it doesn’t seem like they could get away with more than two or three of these without the stack crumbling. Huey looks around the room again. Posters? That technically makes a shadow. “What’s that wall made out of?”

Dewey knocks on the middle shape. “Wall.”

“Right. Take one of the push-pins from a poster and see if it’ll go in. I’m going to keep folding.”

Dewey shrugs and does as he’s told. It takes a little effort, but it does go in. “I think it’s, uh... Wood? Why did you need to know?”

“Take down the posters and bring them and the push pins over.”

Dewey glares at him for a moment, but does as asked. “Thanks for helping me, Dewey! I appreciate you, Dewey! I’ll name my firstborn after you so they’ll turn out just as cool and loyal as you, Dewey!”

“Shut up, Dewey.” Huey meets his brother at the puzzle with his stack of sweaters and stacks them up. At this point, they have about half of the pedestal portion filled. Huey takes one poster and starts carefully folding it up, trying to make the same weird shape as the lump at the top. There’s a nagging at the back of his head telling him not to crease posters, but he keeps telling himself that this is important. Besides, Lena had already creased all of her posters to practical ruin before they even got down here. “Use that one to finish the long part.”

Dewey rolls up the poster, then flattens it against the wall. Wrong size. It takes him a couple re-tries, but he gets it in shape and then pins it in place. Huey does the same with his abstract snowflake of a poster on top. They both step away and once they do, the shape sinks in, causing their little tower to topple. Dewey pumps his fist in the air. “Alright, one more, what do we need to do for it?”  
Huey has already started cleaning up the remnants of the toppled tower by the time Dewey finishes his small celebration. “It looks like we can make it if we both make a shadow puppet off to this side, like uh...”

Dewey looks it over. “You make a snail and I make an elephant?”

“Yeah, like that.”

Once the mess is cleared Huey comes up to the side of the last shape and makes about half of it, leaving the lower bit for Dewey. To get in there and make the shadow the right size he has to tuck a leg between Huey’s and shove his head into his brother’s neck. They argue under their breath for a minute and end up looking like a game of twister turned disastrous, but the shape sinks in.

After this they are knocked over as the wall moves like it’s going to switch around again, but stops midway, leaving two openings into the next room. Dewey goes in first, ignoring it as Huey calls for him to, “Be careful,” because, “There could be traps in there!”

The room is compact and made out of stone. It looks a lot like a sewer, but just a tiny section of it with the sewage totally drained out. In the middle of it there is a pedestal and it is empty. Dewey reaches it and starts hunting around for a switch or button or lever, which there _has_ to be.

“Dewey. Stop that.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing here.”

“What do you mean there’s nothing here? We had to solve a puzzle, there’s always something past puzzles.”

“Well Magica already solved it. There was a book or a box or... A rectangle on this pedestal. See the dust? Whatever was here is already gone.”

“Huey, there has to be something. I came here for adventure and if we don’t like... Solve a mystery or something then what’s the point.”

“The point wasn’t to solve a mystery in the first place! The point was to find some information we could use to save Lena and we found that. Even if we didn’t get _whatever_ was here.”

“I guess.”

“Now let’s get out of here before Magica shows up.”

“Pshh. Yeah, she’s coming here because she forgot her magic dust bunny.”

“Or to _sleep_.”

“Oh, right. I guess it’s hard to get an apartment on a wizard’s budget,” Dewey stands and stretches and then turns to walk out, then takes a closer look at his brother. Huey is holding his Junior Woodchuck guide to his side, rather than letting it sit under his hat like usual. His eyes are low and his stance is stiff. Dewey sighs and puts an arm around him when he gets close. “Look, we didn’t find much this time. So what? We have airplanes and submarines and jet packs we can take on joyrides to hunt down the umbranom-nom-nom.”

“Umbranomicon.”

“That too. Now let’s get out of here before Magica shows up and hits us with her big stick.”

Huey laughs a little at this and tucks his book under his hat. “Yeah, yeah.”


End file.
